Product Reviews

Its name might suggest a program to rid the Internet of unsavoury content, but the ambitions of Smith Micro's Internet Cleanup 5 are decidedly less grandiose. The program's single window groups a dozen separate web-based housekeeping utilities into three categories: browser maintenance; privacy protection and system protection.

The core function of the program's suite of browser tools is to remove traces of your online activity. Its Cookie Finder and Web History Finder applications search for cookie and history files on your Mac, and allow actions to be performed on them, such as removing or selectively editing them. While history and cookie deletion is something that can be easily done within most web browser applications, we like the way you can scour for files for all your installed browsers. Some of the functions of these two programs are duplicated in another maintenance application, Internet File Finder, which also searches for web cache files and auto-fill fields and edits or deletes them.

IM Log Cleaner makes a good job of finding and deleting chat logs, not just from the likely Internet messaging candidates, but from third-party clients such as Adium, too. Internet Cleanup's functions have stretched beyond its original role, but a new Bookmark Manager, which synchronises bookmarks between browsers, is an undeniably handy organiser.

Another add-on, the self-explanatory Simple File Hider, lets you select files or folders to make invisible in the Finder. It's an easy way to remove files from casual view, and it's a cinch to manage. All hidden files are shown in a password-protected list in the Simple File Hider application, and you can easily make them viewable again by clicking on the 'Show in Finder' button.

NetBlockade is a hit-and-miss

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advert, pop-up window and Flash blocker for web browsers. Its standard settings work only moderately well - it failed to spot about a third of adverts on the sites we tested it with and it mistakenly blocked one non-advert image. You can tweak its settings in an Advanced Settings menu by adding source URLs to block or unblock, but you can't block adverts based on other criteria such as size. Again, while advert and pop-up blockers are either present or easy to add to the likes of Safari, Firefox and OmniWeb, the selling point here is that NetBlockade's settings can apply to all browsers at once.

Internet Cleanup now promises to keep your Mac secure on a local network as well as the Internet. New in version 5, Device Sentry aims to prevent your data being copied to a flash disk or other removable drive. When an external disk is connected, a warning message appears and requires an admin password to access it.

But such useful features are balanced by disappointing ones. The Secure Delete program offers versatility - a sliding scale to choose the number of times a file will be overwritten and drag-and-drop ease of use - but we're still left wondering what's so bad about Mac OS X's own secure deletion function. And MailCleaner isn't - as you might hope - an application to protect your Mail from spam, rather simply a program to remove attachments from common email applications. We've never found it very difficult to do this from within Apple Mail or Microsoft Entourage.

SpyAlert, which searches for spyware on your hard drive, takes an age to trawl a disk - it feels even longer because its progress bar doesn't clearly indicate how long it has to go. Given the chances of actually finding spyware on a Mac we can't see it being frequently used.

If Internet Cleanup's eclectic mix of practical and frivolous tends towards feature bloat, a saving grace is the unifying scheduling function. Through a simple dialog window, you can set many of its programs to run automatically at set times, applying chosen actions and log the results either to an activity log or an email message.

While you're unlikely to use every Internet Cleanup application regularly, the program's scheduling and reporting functions add value to features you might otherwise ignore. If you spend a lot of time on the Internet, this inexpensive purchase will prove worthwhile.